Bundler 0.9 and Rails 2.3.5

Bundler 0.9 is out, and people have been having trouble getting it working with Rails 2.3.5 applications. In order to help with that, I’ll be keeping this blog post updated with the latest instructions on converting a Rails 2.3.5 application over to use Bundler 0.9.

The first step in converting is to tweak the configuration and startup files in your app. You’ll need to add a monkeypatch to your app’s config/boot.rb file:

Next, you’ll need to add a new file at config/preinitializer.rb, and put this into it:

By the time you have finished, there shouldn’t be any config.gem statements left in your environment.rb file. All the gems that your application depends on should be listed in your Gemfile instead. If you have gems that should only be loaded in certain environments, like development-only or test-only gems, you can put those in the “development” and “test” groups.

When you’re done, you can install your gems and record the specific versions that you are using, so that they won’t change unexpectedly as you deploy:

bundle install
bundle lock

After you have installed and locked your bundle, you can run Rails scripts directly. However, you must run all other commands via bundle exec. For example:

./script/server
bundle exec rake db:migrate

When you deploy your application, you will need to run bundle install as part of your deploy process, typically after your code has been updated but before you restart your app servers. If you have development gems that you can’t (or don’t want to) install on your production machine, you can run bundle install --without development.

There are a lot more things you can do with the Bundler. If you want to read about them, I suggest checking out the Bundler README.